Wednesday, May 7, 2008

Team Foundation Server 2008 Hardware Migration

In the last two weeks, I have been through two TFS hardware migrations, neither of which went smoothly. The first migration involved moving to a new server on a new domain and the second was a new server on the same domain. Neither installation is that large so we have both TFS and SQL running on the same box.

The part that did not work was moving the data tier. It would fail with a variety of errors. I checked the connection string web.config in the Services virtual under the Team Foundation Server site hosted on port 8080. It was right, but TFS would not work. After some digging around in the event log, I saw that it was still trying to connect to the old database server. Thinking I missed some steps, I started back over from the beginning and ran into the same issues again. I was not able to find any other connection string in any of the TFS website structure, so I started digging into the database. This sure was starting to feel like a BizTalk database recovery (which is much worse!!). In the TFSIntegration database, there is a table called tbl_database (just in case being in the Tables collection wasn't enough of a clue that it was a table). And there they were, serveral entries with the old database server name. So, I manually changed these to the new db server and tfs was working!!! After that, everyone was able to sync up their source just fine and we were working again. The team project sites were even working.

In the end, two successful migrations. In reading some of the issues others have run into, the migration doc needs some work. I still don't know why following the doc didn't work for the data tier and what the right way is (maybe this is it!).

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IT professional with over 17 years of experience designing and building scalable systems as a developer and architect/team lead. Most recently focused on building web sites/services and mobile applications on Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS cloud solutions.